Folding of text is a visual way of tucking in groups of text out of sight to improve legibility and reduce distraction. Vim supports folding of text. Here are a couple of Vim commands that will help you master folding of text in Vim with ease.

Vim's folding commands start with the letter z.

Let's get started. To practice as you learn, open a lengthy text file in Vim editor.

Creating Vim Folds

In Vim, folding text is quite simple. You use the following syntax to create a fold in Vim.

zf followed by the number of lines to fold giving direction in which to fold.

zf5j - This Vim command folds the next five lines of text from the cursor position.

zf5k - folds the five lines above the cursor from the cursor position.

Move your cursor a few lines below and create a marker there using the Vim command ma. Where 'a' is the name of the marker, just like how you name a tag.

Next move your cursor to a different location in the text file opened in Vim. To fold text between the marker and the cursor position you can use the Vim command zfa'.

Folding also works in visual mode. Press the key v to enter the visual mode in Vim. Then select a few lines of text by moving the cursor. Now use the Vim command zf to fold the selected lines.

Suppose you want to create a fold including all the text between line number 10 and 25. This is easily done by using the Vim command :10,21fold. The beauty of this command is it works even if your cursor is not on the line number.

Of course, to fold from the cursor position to a particular line number, you can use the Vim command :.,21fold. Where the dot (.) indicates the current line.

You can fold from your cursor position to the first search result of a word. For this, you use the Vim command zf/search_word.

As you can see from the examples above, Vim folding is quite powerful and can be used in many flexible ways.

You can nest folds. ie. have folds within folds in Vim.

Opening and Closing Vim Folds

To open a folding in Vim, place the cursor on the fold and press the Vim command zo.

The zc Vim command will close an already open fold.

zo doesn't open all the nested folds. To do that, you need to use the Vim command zO.
However, using zc will close all the nested open folds.

To open all the Vim foldings, use the command zR. However, to open only first level folds you can use zr.

Similarly, zM will close all open folds and zm will re-fold the first level folds.

Moving between folds

The same way as you use j and k to move between lines, you can use zj and zk to move between Vim folds.

To move between start and end of a fold, use the Vim commands [z and ]z respectively.

Deleting folds

zE will delete all the folds you have created in your file. However, if you just want to delete the Vim fold below your cursor, you can use zd.